Monthly Archives: August 2003

One of the mysteries, to me, of the past two years has been how little discussion there has been of Bill Clinton’s miserable record on terrorism, and how his administration’s malfeasance contributed to our current predicament. Perhaps that is about to change, as Richard Mintiter’s Losing bin Laden is coming out next week. Matt Drudge has an “exclusive” on it, and other news outlets, like thbookservice.com are featuring the book. »

Several days ago, I discussed Joshua Muravchik’s piece in Commentary called the Neoconservaive Cabal (not yet available on the net, to my knowledge). My discussion at that time was confined to some shocking (but not surprising) factual errors in a New York Times piece about neoconservatives and their alleged connection to the philosopher Leo Strauss. Actually, Muravchik spends several pages documenting the “sheer sloppiness” of mainstream press coverage of the »

George Will on Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Clark’s (imaginary?) Canadian friend. Will finds that Clark is “not like Ike.” He finds some resemblance, though, between Clark and Sen. Graham, his fellow “deranged moderate.” As to Dean, Will’s line seems to be that he’s a great candidate for Republicans unless he wins, and he could win. To me, however, Dean is the ideal nominee, period. The ultra-liberal, anti-interventionist positions he »

Those seeking additional evidence to justify Rocket Man’s skepticism of news stories based on anonymous sources (expressed below) might want to consider this anonymously sourced story out of the Tehran Times in Iran implicating Israeli agents for the blast in Najaf on Friday: “Mossad agents in Najaf blast.” (Courtesy of the Middle East Media Research Institute and Little Green Footballs.) And those seeking additional evidence to support discontinuing American foreign »

I don’t put much faith in anything that comes from Time magazine, and one of these days we need to stop and take a hard look at the whole subject of anonymous sources. We’ve gotten to the point where a huge proportion of significant news stories are based on information from unnamed sources; not only is the practice rarely criticized, there seems to be a tacit assumption in many quarters »

One of the lowlights of the annual convention of the American Political Science Association was the speech by John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO. I just returned this morning from the convention in Philadelphia and read this account of Sweeney’s speech yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “AFL-CIO chief says democracy weakening.” »

Minneapolis Star Tribune travel writer Catherine Watson camped out with the Confederates during the reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg earlier this month. You might say she enjoyed it: “Even watching from the sidelines, I found it thrilling…I’ve always been interested in the Civil War, and I’d always wanted to try reenacting. But I never imagined I’d be wearing gray. Or that I’d be impersonating a man.” Her story is »

The city of Minneapolis sits in Hennepin County and presents the biggest law enforcement challenge in the state of Minnesota. The Hennepin County Attorney prosecutes the huge volume of criminal cases that make their way through the court system, many of which are high profile and high stakes cases involving crimes of violence committed by members of the racial and ethnic gangs that have taken over significant swatches of the »

You really couldn’t make this stuff up. From today’s New York Times Corrections section: “Because of an editing error, an article last Sunday about the 1963 civil rights March on Washington referred incorrectly in some copies to a Civil War general to whom one marcher referred in a speech. The general, William T. Sherman, was a Union general, not a Confederate general.” If you go back to the original article, »

Tonight, I caught a few minutes of an interview Tim Russert did with Don Van Natta, author of a book about presidents and golf called First Off the Tee. Russert played an old interview of Bill Clinton on Meet the Press in which he asked the then-president how many mulligans (do-over shots) he took in an average round. Clinton, looking shiftier than even at the height of the Monica affair, »

Believe it or not, that’s the headline in tomorrow’s Guardian. Like Charlie Brown and the football, liberals fall for the the same line time after time. They always believe that peace was just around the corner…this time the Palestinians really meant it…the mass murder attacks were just about to stop…and then Israel had to go and retaliate! The Guardian can’t help admitting the effectiveness of Israel’s tactic: “Hamas has decided »

In the early 1990’s the Minnesota Supreme Court appointed a committee to study the existence of racial disparities in the Minnesota courts. The Committee subsequently issued a long report finding the courts guilty of racial mistreatment of memebers of minorities and together with a set of statistical studies that belied the report’s findings. Although the court system has been eager in essence to confess to its own (nonexistent) mistreatment of »

The distinguished historian Bernard Lewis, writing for the Wall Street Journal, surveys the situation in Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq. He finds it surprising that things are going much better in Afghanistan than in Iraq, and attributes this to the fact that “in Afghanistan there is an Afghan government, while in Iraq there is an Amreican adminstration.” He recommends that the U.S. “hand over [control], as soon as possible, to a »

Four suspects have been arrested in yesterday’s mosque bombing in Iraq, which killed more than 100. Two of the suspects are Iraqis, and two–surprise–are Saudis. The suspects said that: “a recent wave of bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country’s porous borders, where suspected foreign fighters are believed to be infiltrating.” »

At the end of a long week, a photo blog entry is about all I’m good for. If you’re as worn out as I am, you might enjoy these items. American sprinters won the gold and silver medals in the 200m at the IAAF World Athletic Championships today. Beats the heck out of 1968, right? Jeff Bezos (he’s the one on the right) and Anna Kournikova opened trading at NASDAQ »